Bestselling Author and Mental Health Advocate
What do a beauty pageant winner, a retired state probation officer, a former homeless man, and a grieving father have in common?
Pete Earley talking with Nita Brown, NAMI President Arapahoe Douglas Counties
Those of you who read my blog regularly can easily guess the answer. All four have had their lives impacted by mental illnesses. But that is not why I am writing about them. I want to share their stories with you because of how they have chosen to react to the hurdles they’ve encountered.
Advocating for better mental health care is a top priority to me, but it’s not my only interest. I took time last week to have lunch with a friend of mine who works for a U.S. intelligence agency and our conversation quickly turned to Russia.
I have been fascinated with the Kremlin and Moscow much of my life. Perhaps, it started when I was a youngster living in Pueblo, Colorado when my mother began storing food items in the bathroom closet in 1962. The bathroom was the only room in our small house that didn’t have windows, which was why it was chosen as our family’s emergency bomb shelter if the Soviet Union attacked.
For those too young to remember, 1962 was when the Cuban Missile Crisis happened and at the elementary school that I attended, we did drills where we either hurried into hallways or ducked under our desks. That was supposed to help us if bombs fell.
My parents, Elmer and Jean, are 90 and 91 years-old respectively and this coming Saturday, they will celebrate their 67th wedding anniversary. Until she became blind, my mother faithfully took photographs with her much-loved Brownie camera and kept them in scrapbooks for our family. She and my father also had their picture taken on each of their wedding anniversaries — often with that same old camera.
I will be taking their photograph this week and adding it to their ongoing wedding album. To me, 
these 66 photographs show more than the aging of a couple. They mark events in their lives and in mine.
My parents left their wedding in a car that my dad had bought for $150. They couldn’t drive at night because the headlights didn’t work. They were headed West from their family homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in 1943 with no jobs and no real idea of where they might settle. Click to continue…
Think of a book that had an impact on you.
Pete Earley is the bestselling author of such books as The Hot House and Crazy. When he is not spending time with his family, he tours the globe advocating for mental health reform.
As a former reporter for The Washington Post, Pete uses his journalistic background to take a fair-minded approach to the story all while weaving an interesting tale for the reader.